


we'll be a fine line

by orphan_account



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Multi, Reincarnation, based off of 25 lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21985759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: All of that aside, Kun wonders if this will be the last time they meet, each time.
Relationships: Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten/Qian Kun
Comments: 12
Kudos: 36
Collections: NCT Rarepair Winter Bingo





	we'll be a fine line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crackle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crackle/gifts).



> bingo tiles cleared: **first snow** , **ugly sweaters**
> 
> this is based off of the popular short comic strip by tongari titled [25 lives.](https://s2b2.livejournal.com/142934.html) highly recommend you read this first if you haven’t and the illustration is beautiful! there's so many of these AUs based off tongari’s piece that used to be around for various different fandoms and thought i'd like to try for this one as a kind of practice piece for a ship i like a lot but have never written for before (read: said practice was hard, this is less than 2.5k but why did it feel like a lot...) so anyway this exists now..
> 
>  **warning:**  
>  gender changes between reincarnations and major character death but since this is a reincarnation au, their death is deemed temporary in this context and the story goes on i.e. everything and everyone is fine

In some of the lifetimes where they meet, it’s snowing.

The first time is during the first fall of snow, gentle and coming down soft. Kun is called Keiko, and his shoes are trekking a road lined with street lamps like floating orbs, breath billowing out in clear white wisps. He's bringing his radio in a backpack to get it fixed by a guy named Tatsu, some new guy working at the electronics and machinery shop. Tatsu looks like he doesn’t quite fit in here right away in the heart of Kyoto with harsh gold-streaked hair and about six or seven piercings altogether glinting off his ears and a brow. The shop in this part of the area becomes another stop Keiko starts frequenting, if only because Tatsu with his highlights fading by the time winter ends, actually holds nice conversations with him despite the insufferable small debates he tries to pick with Keiko.

When summer comes, the fresh streaks in his hair burn under the sun. Tatsu moves back to Tokyo, his eyes curving, creasing delicately when Keiko tells him to stay safe and good luck. He can’t stop thinking about Tatsu’s smile.

In another lifetime, they’re a little younger. The world had been lined with first snow again. Lee Youngji yelled a screechy _sorry_ for nearly flatlining Hyungkwon, when she’d sped past him with her bike downhill near Gangnam. He’d yanked out his earphones so hard one of the cords hanging by wires nearly snapped for good. He was stubborn that way, using everything he owned up past the wear and tear until they broke beyond repair. Youngji offers Hyungkwon blueberry-flavored Xylitol in class later as an apology and they exchange numbers. Hyungkwon doesn’t even like gum but he accepts, and neither does Youngji and they laugh about it because it’s nice to feel ready to share something with someone.

They run into each other again, kiss by accident; drunk and not quite right, and he tells Youngji she would have looked good with blond streaks in her hair when she tells him she’s thinking about dyeing it that way. Hyungkwon remembers the color of honey and fire in the summer season and he knows. He should know, even if Youngji doesn’t. He thinks he would have made an effort to get it right if there was a second time here.

There isn’t.

The lifetime where Kun becomes a goner is the one where they grow up together in the same school on the same track team. Tia doesn’t like fruits so she trades the school’s fruit salad on her lunch tray one day for Kay’s _boh loh bao_ when Kay offers, pointing out to Tia how it’s called pineapple bread with no pineapple at all. That’s how they become friends. 

Kay falls in love before she recognizes it for what it is. She thought it horrible first—like flight or fight kicking at her when Tia holds her hand throughout New Year’s Eve weaving through the chattering crowd in Lan Kwai Fong to go back home to their families in the same old building with mismatched fading paint jobs and colorful lines of laundry still hanging out. Tia sidles up against her as they’re watching movies together, lean legs under Kay’s, steady prickling heat against the bare skin making her insides curl like they’re licked by flames. 

In this world, they talk about big dreams, listening to Taiwanese pop and littering Tia’s bedroom floor with sketches and test papers. Tia has her bad ideas, and Kay learns to toe the line between going along with them and what she knows is safe. Tia loves her back anyway and Kay’s pulled in completely; Tia’s fingers playing the gentle curve of her jaw and her waist as they kiss, ducking under the monsoon rain for shelter with linked hands. How Kay reacts to all of it so outwardly, lips grazing under Tia’s track shirt and how Kay’s thighs fall open and her hips jerk into Tia’s hand. Her firsts here feel immeasurable and endless enough. It’s where she learned to put a name to what she feels and will continue to feel past her other lives. Like a homecoming. Sometimes it feels like reconciling.

“Reconciling over what?” Tia asks once, slipping off her thin glasses and rubbing her eyes over her homework.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I can’t help but think that”—Kay keeps her tongue between her teeth, feeling the words deflate the longer she’s silent. 

She doesn’t know if she gets to keep Tia in this lifetime. She makes her mistakes, they fumble through it blindly.

Besides, in other lives, love isn’t enough for Ten to stay and Kun can’t fault him for it. 

He deals with the lifetimes better where they don’t meet. 

Because it’s just less complicated that way when he looks up at a painting in the MoMa, depicting the kind of surrealism that his wife hates in art. She admires the vivid contrasts of flowers surfacing from dark blue ocean of thick brushstrokes, texture of the painting visibly lightened in hand if anyone inspects it going upwards. She mentions later on that she thinks it better than the likes of Dali, and in this life, Kun has seen many works of art, curated and collected them for a living.

The artist is a young woman named Teresa Leonard who passed away before Kun was even born. He stares at her photo on the internet, eyes curved and glittering through the screen and he can’t help but feel loss.

He buys the painting out eventually for a fortune he can afford anyway.

Other times, they walk by each other as strangers and stay that way. Kun never turns back nor stop, despite the force of a magnet on his heels at the brush of contact, the quick shoulder bump and swift apology on a crowded street full of people in Times Square, or on the lively streets of Rio during festivities. Or not even when he and everyone else is running for their lives, the shouting in his ears muffled by the war planes overhead in Vietnam. 

And then there’s that one time Kun is born again into a time where Ten loves him unconditionally when they meet. Kun thinks it’s kind of funny, that he really doesn’t have to do much to give back his affection here—he’s not killing rats anymore and leaving them on Theo’s grandparents’ doorstep ever since he’s stopped being a stray when Theo begged to take him in. Frankly, Kun hates the name he’s given in this life; ‘Gooby’ sounds like it should be for the geese that Theo and his grandparents rear by the Italian countryside, the same ones Kun likes to watch, sunbathing on their farm. But what’s he supposed to do when Theo prepares his meals and feeds him the best salmon and tuna he’s ever tasted, at least as a cat? 

Kun watches Theo grow up through the years, feathery tail swatting at Theo’s neck and ear whenever he dozes off for too long in between chores in the summer. Theo and his cousins will wander around the house in ugly Christmas sweaters knitted by his grandmother come winter, and Gooby will have his claws dutifully clipped so he won’t ruin them.

One day, Theo doesn’t come back the following year and his visits become scarce. It’s the supposed mark of adulthood when a bright kid finally goes off to university, which Kun doesn’t comprehend and doesn’t quite care to in all its other-world details. All he knows is that the looming walls of the quaint house by the countryside grow colder every year Theo doesn’t visit his grandparents living here, until Kun’s lithe body and sharp mind get stiff and mortifyingly slow from the lingering cold, tuna, salmon and everything else no longer appealing to him.

He hates how upset Theo got knowing Gooby was getting sicker. He’d like to think he’d hold out when his grandma strokes him between his ears, murmuring that Theo will be back this Christmas. 

But Gooby doesn’t. 

So in the next life, Kun apologizes for that by grinning sheepishly at him when they’re just scrawny teenagers across a school soccer field on opposite sides of rival teams. He keeps Ten sane when he’s wrought with nightmares, the peach and tangerine sky outside their window in an eternal solar eclipse in this barren world, while the troublemakers riot below in panic and the blood will permanently stain the concrete throughout an uprising. They make promises even when he knows he’ll be waiting on Earth for Ten to come back down, light years away on a space mission. 

A couple of times, it doesn’t turn out for the better when they’re older. The spaces between their fingers feel more like intrusions when filled, breathing an off-set rhythm; Ten recognizes when to finally make decisions and Kun has to let sink in what’s best for both of them. He thinks, in another life, where his eyes linger on the wedding band that isn’t the other match to his, and the familiar smile of its owner, that Ten would be happier this way without him.

If that’s not how it goes, then the good thing is this: Ten gets past the veneer Kun has and slips through the cracks anyway, because Kun will let him in again. Ten makes sure to think things through before deciding on his own. They learn to forgive each other, and themselves.

“You deserve to be with someone you love,” Ten says plainly and it’s a testament to how serious he is, cheeky grin long gone, eyes raking over Kun when he’s breathing hard under him, Kun's heart pounding. The simmering flames licking at Kun's insides again are a full on fire now throughout everything. 

Kun kind of likes how they have some consistency when they’re older; Ten will laugh at him for all his weird ideas. Kun will still half-heartedly scoff at some honest thing Ten says that manages to surprise him. He’s done that by a fair lot when he counts their lifetimes together. And Kun scoffs like he’d been Keiko long before cringing inwardly at a sharp-tongued joke Ten as Tatsu had barked at him, Kay kicking her socked feet against Tia’s shin under the kitchen table when Tia teased her with a mildly inappropriate joke; like how he’d turned up his nose and scampered away when Theo tried to fit Gooby into that ugly miniature Christmas sweater when he’d gained weight.

“Well then you’re right here,” Kun mutters. It conjures an ache. Takes the words after that from his throat when Ten drops eye contact only to close his eyes and kiss him. There is slow spread of electric on Kun’s skin from Ten’s mouth that he still loves and Ten says the kind of things that gets him to react in the prettiest ways at least to Ten. He doesn’t always say the same things, but they’ve fucked just enough for Kun to be able to remember _a lot_ of it throughout different universes, no matter what names they’ve taken up now.

If Kun’s being honest, he can’t even remember if Keiko and Tatsu were the beginning. After all, he prefers to give himself the benefit of the doubt, and wonder if it really is Ten he’s seeing when they meet again. 

But anyway, what matters is now:

Here in Seoul, in a small living living room dimly lit, him and Ten sit together on the couch, close enough for their elbows to brush. Kun taste tests the chrysanthemum tea, careful not to scald his tongue. It warms his fingers immediately, his lips still chapped from the frost outside, snow coming down in a steady whorl from their view of the window. Here, Kun’s dreams make him feel like he’s either submerged and floating underwater, in a cocoon of time, or drowning in it because he knows how little of time there is.

Of course, shit like that doesn’t scare Ten at all.

“Weren’t you the one who told us all before, that we’re all just making the most of what we have during our time together?” Ten reminds him, voice crackling in the silence. Time meaning contract on the company’s terms, time meaning the blatant impermanence of it all.

“Huh. You remember what I said,” Kun says out loud wearily. He cracks a smile when Ten gives him a look, narrowed eyes and unamused. It’s a look he knows well.

All of that aside, Kun wonders if this will be the last time they meet, each time.

In this world, everything glitters when they’re happiest, living out another shared dream. It’s just them surrounded by the stars. 

Ten’s figure is on a stage, five others around him and Kun on the balls of their feet, running and catching confetti as if they can fly. They soak in the roaring devotion in the stadium for an encore, adrenaline thundering through their veins and throat dry. Kun feels his arm being pulled, a gentle nudge to his waist from Winwin and Yangyang towards the middle of the stage and Lucas’ hand is steady for a brief moment he places it on Kun's shoulder as they stand before the swell of the crowd. 

Maybe in this universe, both of them, and the others too **—** they won’t stay together. Ten and him are not what they were before—not strangers never meeting nor lovers who make promises and try to make good on them. 

But still there’s comfort, a weightless uplift in Kun’s chest when Ten takes his hand and squeezes, their palms moist from the sweat and heat of the blinding lights.

It feels a bit like a homecoming each time he falls in step with Ten.

One more lifetime together and that’s more than fine.


End file.
